


Through A Glass, Darkly

by Summerbreeze



Series: Born in Blood [1]
Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Creepy, F/M, Ghosts, Like, Past Incest, Still sad that Thomas died, Vengeful Spirits, depictions of madness, hella super creepy, important ocs, lots of pining, maybe I failed at creepy, or at least it should be, pining for dead lover, pssst... here be spoilers!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-27 14:41:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5052580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Summerbreeze/pseuds/Summerbreeze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Edith lives on and manages to find some measure of happiness. Lucille's spirit, earth-bound by fierce hatred, is unwilling to accept this. Even in death, she finds ways to threaten everything Edith cares for, and eventually, Edith is forced to decide what she is willing to sacrifice in order to protect that which is most precious to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ruined

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you who don't know, the title, 'Through A Glass, Darkly', refers to series of short horror stories written by Sheridan LeFanu, and is kind of a reference to the veil of death and the fact that we mere mortals never will really understand the other side until we are there ourselves.
> 
> I was pleased with my literary reference, but maybe it just makes me pretentious?
> 
> SUPER excited about this story. Dear Thomas is still dead, and I feel like I'd like to write a fix-it for that someday, but fear not- he still makes appearances in this story.

i

 

_January, 1902_

 

“They say it’s going to scar, you know.”

“Oh no, what a shame! And on her face, too! Oh, she’ll just be ruined!”

The sly curve of a spiteful smirk.

“Don’t be silly, there’s no one to be ruined for. You heard her, she wanted to die a widow, like Mary Shelley.”

Poor attempts at muffling vicious giggles follow Edith, though she holds her head high and her spine straight as she continues to walk. Eunice McMichael still harbours horrible jealousy towards Edith for her marriage to Sir Thomas Sharpe last October, but Edith can’t find it within herself to resent the grudge the other woman holds against her. In fact, Edith almost pities her. Eunice has no idea how close she’d come to death. If Thomas had chosen her instead…

If Thomas had chosen Eunice…

Would he have fallen in love with her? The way he claimed to have fallen in love with Edith? Does she even believe such claims?

Such thoughts make her heart wrench painfully, and she decides that they are best ignored. There’s no finding out now, not with so many miles, a whole ocean, between her and Allerdale. She doubts that Thomas’ soul even resides there anymore. Something deep within tells her that he is no longer bound by this plane of existence, nor are her mother and father. She doesn’t know how precisely she knows this, but nonetheless, she knows it with bone-deep certainty, as though she’s had it whispered into her ear through the shadowed veil of the afterlife.

Similarly, she absolutely knows that Lucille is still in that wretched-beautiful house.

Lucille’s hatred for her is a dark, cold, black thing which clings to her with all the smothering tenacity of ever-growing ivy, clogging her lungs with thickness like oil, like the oozing, liquid clay of Crimson Peak. Even in death Lucille cannot find rest from her volatile madness, her raging, screaming hatred, and even with all these miles, even with this ocean between them, in Buffalo, Edith can still feel Lucille’s hatred malevolently clawing its way towards her all the way from Allerdale Hall, across whole continents.

At the shiver that erupts down her spine, Edith decides that these thoughts are also best ignored.

_‘I usually close my eyes to the things I don’t wish to see’_ , he’d said. _‘It makes life so much easier.’_

_‘I don’t want to close my eyes’_ , she’d returned.

Now, Edith wishes so much to close her eyes, but she’s seen too much now and she finds that she _can’t_.

 

ii

 

Edith carefully prods the almost healed gash on her right cheek. She still remembers the feverish light of enraged madness in Lucille’s eyes as she had slashed wildly at Edith through the wrought-iron bars of the elevator. Her dark, shining braid swinging with her frantic movements, the bright red blood trailing thickly down her white nightdress…

Yes, it will scar, as Eunice had so delightedly pointed out to her friend earlier that afternoon, though Edith does not think she’d go so far as to say she’ll be _ruined_. As though something as simple as a skin blemish could be the breaking point, after all she’s been through. If she were _ruined_ then it would be because of a dark, rotting manor house sinking into blood red clay, because of cold, hateful eyes and a disdainful smile…

If she were _ruined_ , it would be because of dark curls and warm hands, a gentle smile and captivating grey eyes…

Besides, she doesn’t want to marry someone so shallow as to reject her for something so silly as a scar.

She doesn’t want to marry again at all.

_‘I’d rather be like Mary Shelley’_ , she’d said, long ago at summer’s end, a lifetime ago, before she’d had any idea of what real love is like, and how painful it is to lose. _‘She died a widow.’_

 

iii

 

At night, she wakes, gasping and breathless from dreams of smoky, shadowy figures, screams passing through the veil of death, decomposing bodies rising through red liquid clay, a dark, shining braid and a wildly slashing knife, glinting wickedly in the dim light.

She leans over and vomits over the side of the bed. Trembling, she stares at the reeking mess and considers leaving it for the maids to clean up in the morning.

Sighing, she makes the same decision she’s made every night since returning to America. She cleans up the mess and returns to bed, passing another sleepless night staring at the ceiling.

The maids don’t need to know how often this happens. They’d only worry. Or worse, they’d tell Alan.

 

iv

 

_February, 1902_

 

The sickness begins to come all the time, and Edith is afraid. Afraid that the events at Allerdale have affected her more deeply than she’d ever want to admit, afraid that they have made her weak and frail. She begins to dream of those nights she’d wake alone, pain twinging through the soft, delicate tissues that make up her internal organs, the way she’d wake coughing with the taste of copper in her mouth and bloodstains against snow white linen. She becomes afraid then that Alan had been wrong, the poison had affected her more critically than imaginable. She dreams that that slow-moving poison is still rotting her from the inside out, until she’s just like Allerdale Hall, an empty core with a lovely exterior.

She wakes crying, and she finally relents, going to visit Alan rather than another doctor. Alan knows what she’s been through. Alan bled to free her from that awful place. Alan understands. Alan doesn’t pry. Alan is safe.

 

v

 

Alan is disappointed. He is anguished. She sees it in his eyes for a split second, just behind the surprise, and then there is only resignation and the same tired, painful smile he’d worn when she’d told him, breathless and pink-cheeked with excitement, that she’d accepted Sir Thomas Sharpe’s marriage proposal.

“You’re not dying, Edith,” he says, and relief sweeps through her so strongly she could scream, and all she can think is _‘then why do you still look so broken, Alan?’_

“You’re pregnant.”

 

vi

 

She lies in bed and stares up at the ceiling, another sleepless night stretching out before her. Delicate fingers cup her soft abdomen, that space just between her navel and the wide expanse of her hips where her child is safely nestled, and wonders whether or not a God truly exists. Was this his plan for her? Widowed and alone and lonely, like Mary Shelley? A single mother, forever the gossip on the lips of women like Eunice McMichael? Or is she such an oddity that she defies even such an almighty power? Perhaps she was not created on the side of divinity, and has instead risen from something dark, and cursed, as surely Thomas and Lucille must have, something evil and wicked?

Will her child be evil and wicked too?

She wonders if God will forgive her for loving it regardless, as already her heart twists and softens at the mere thought of her unborn child. She carries a secret hope inside her heart, so secret that it is almost a secret from herself-

She hopes that this child will be made in Thomas’ image.

She decides that she must be ruined after all.


	2. Eyes Forward

i

 

_March, 1902_

 

Alan has since proposed marriage three times.

Edith has refused on each occasion.

She cannot help but wonder if she had been twisted and tainted in some seemingly inconceivable and yet truly horrifying way, even before the life-altering events of Allerdale Hall. Why else would she be so unmoved by the honest love of a good man like Alan McMichael, and yet nearly set aflame by the deceitful love of a man so twisted as Sir Thomas Sharpe?

_Oh, Thomas…_

She cannot help but think of him now, now that she has a being of his creation inside of her. He was always creating things, her Thomas. She wonders how he would feel about this creation. She knows that he had made a similar creation with Lucille, and though it makes her feel violently ill to think on it, think on it she does. The child in the grainy photographs had been beautiful, with dark hair and wide eyes. She wonders if it had been a boy or a girl. She wonders if her own child will be a boy or a girl. She wonders if her child will look like that other child, just as delicately beautiful. Lucille had said there was something wrong with it. ‘It’, she’d said. Edith cannot imagine ever calling her child an ‘it’. Even now, unformed, she sees him or her as her child, rather than something so meaningless as an ‘it’. Edith wonders whether there had even been anything wrong with the other child at all. He or she had seemed physically normal in the photographs, and had surely been too young for Lucille to be able to discern any mental defects.

Edith decides that there likely was never anything wrong with Lucille’s child, and the poor thing’s fate had been another unfortunate consequence of Lucille’s own mental instability.

How could Thomas love such a woman? _His own sister._ And what, precisely, is wrong with Edith that she loves such a man as Thomas?

For love him she does, for all she’s tried to deny it. At the thought of carrying his child within her, a bubble of ecstatic happiness forms in her chest, closely chased by deep despair that he will never watch their son or daughter grow as she will, and tears track their way down her temples and into the tangle of golden curls spread upon her pillow.

Never before has she wished so deeply to be haunted, and never has she been so soul-crushingly disappointed by an unfulfilled desire.

 

ii

 

Maybe, if God does exist, this child is a blessing? She had, after all, been poisoned and dying, wounded like an animal, lying broken in Allerdale’s entrance hall until Alan had collected all of her jagged, shattered pieces and tried his best to put her back together. ~~_She thinks she can never really be put back together._~~  She can still see the pleased gleam in Lucille’s eyes as she’d pushed Edith over the railing-

How is her child still alive?

A blessing granted by the questionable existence of an almighty being… Edith has never been religious. Her mother had hustled the Cushing family to church every Sunday, but after his wife’s death, the only time practical Carter Cushing had ever again set foot in a church was for Mary Cushing’s funeral. After her mother’s first terrifying visit, Edith had decided that the existence of ghosts must necessarily disprove the existence of God. Her mother had been entirely unholy in such a ghostly form, that much Edith had known, even at the young age of ten. It had seemed so obvious, even to her naïve, underdeveloped mind. There had simply been no other explanation for the way in which, though Edith had _known_ it was her mother, fear had traced its icy fingertips down her fragile, mortal spine. At her dead mother’s touch, every single one of Edith’s muscles had locked in place, even though every instinct she possessed drummed through her body with a single message- _run, Run, RUN_ \- and a sense of deep wrongness had washed over her, the unnaturalness of such a creature washing over her in waves of inescapable revulsion until finally she couldn’t take it and she’d _screamed_ -

And that is how Edith had known God did not exist- for how could a God exist in the same world as such a desolate creature as her poor, sweet mother had become?

But now she wonders… if God does not exist…

…

…

…

_How is her child still alive?_

 

iii

 

Edith decides that she quite likes the idea that her child is a blessing from God. It makes her feel less guilty about still loving Thomas. Because if this child is from God, then Edith was always _supposed_ to love Thomas.

And Edith loves that idea almost as much as she loves the man.

 

iv

 

_April, 1902_

 

_‘You are always looking to the past, Thomas. You will not find me there.’_

His grey eyes had gleamed silver in the dim light, and he had bent his head to kiss her, dark curls trailing across her forehead. She had responded so eagerly, so in love with him she’d been, so adoring of him.

He had been all she’d had left.

She’d found herself on her back, his lips and beautiful hair trailing down, down, down, causing her breasts to ache where they strained against her corset and her legs to fall open instinctively. His smile becomes slightly wicked as her pulls her skirts up around her hips and drags down her underthings. The long look he graces on her center is enough to make her blush vividly, and then he is leaning down and nipping the inside of her thigh, so very close to the place where she most aches for him, and her breath and her heart both hitch. He gives a long, slow, soothing lick to the previously untouched skin of her smooth thigh, and then he is crawling back up her body, a look of such dark possession in his eyes as Edith has never dreamed of being directed at her, and suddenly- suddenly she is beautiful, and she is confused by the joy that this brings her as she never before cared about physical beauty, but Thomas has made her beautiful, and-

And he is inside of her now. A gasp tumbles from her lips and her legs instinctually fall even wider open, _wider_ , and her hands go to his ass, trying desperately to push him further inside, because this is her husband and she loves him with every fibre of her being, and _he is finally taking her_ -

Edith wakes with a gasp to a dark room in Buffalo, New York, and a cold, lonely bed which her dear Thomas has never graced. Her core is throbbing with frustrated want and she could _cry_ because this is the fifth night in a row she has awoken in such a manner. Unable to help herself, she reaches past the slight swell of her abdomen, and, aroused as she is from the memory-dream, it takes only one, two, three tight circles against her clit before she is coming, toes curling, hips arching and gasping, calling-

_“Thomas!”_

She relaxes into the bed and wonders if she should be ashamed of such wantonness. She eventually comes to the conclusion that she simply can’t be shamed by it, not when the memory of Thomas inside of her is likely her purest, most honest memory of him.

She thinks it terribly cruel of fate, that though she has been raised to be a forward-thinker, she too looks into the past with much more longing than she does the future. For the past is the only place her husband can be found.

 

v

 

_May, 1902_

 

Her condition has become quite obvious to all, and Edith can scarcely walk down the street without triggering waves of gossip. Everyone in Buffalo knows she was married, and so she is not subjected to the scorn that many an unfortunate, single mother must face. No, what Edith is confronted with is much worse:

Pity.

She cannot stand it. Everywhere she goes, from the grocers to the butchers to the doctor’s office to the _park_ , for God’s sake, she cannot escape the pity. She sees it in their eyes, the way they refuse to make eye contact and try not to stare at the growing swell of her child. It is in the way they take her hand and give it a sympathetic pat, in the way that she hears _‘congratulations’_ far less than whispered exclamations of _‘oh, the poor dear…’_

She _hates_ it, hates it so much she could claw her own eyes out and scream, right there, right in the middle of the street.

They used to comment on how terribly self-possessed she was for a woman, and how would a husband ever cope with such a hopelessly outspoken girl? And Edith hadn’t minded, because to her, the words ‘self-possessed’ and ‘outspoken’ hadn’t been an insult as they may have been to any other woman, but were instead markers of personal strength. Now all they see when they look at her is a girl widowed too young, saddled with the child of a dead man.

She does not scream, though. Instead, she does what she has always done, and walks with her spine straight, chin up and eyes forward.

She must always remember to keep her eyes forward.

 

vi

 

_June, 1902_

 

Eunice has become unbearably smug as of late. David Mitchell had moved to Buffalo three months previous, having just passed the bar and become a lawyer. He had showed almost immediate interest in Eunice, and Edith could certainly see why, for the man was just as snobbish and elitist as Alan’s sister. Edith had never been able to wrap her mind around how two siblings could be so different. Then, of course, she had encountered sweet, excitable Thomas, hardly capable of stillness and at times seeming to outwardly buzz with the energy within his mind. He was contrasted sharply by quiet, macabre Lucille, forever in the shadows, hiding with a stillness like death.

After which Edith had simply concluded that perhaps all siblings were vastly different from one another.

Two weeks before, Mr. Mitchell had proposed marriage to Eunice, who had accepted with delight. Ever since, she eyes Edith with the vicious gleam of triumph in her eyes, though what she feels she has to be triumphant about Edith does not know. Thomas chose Edith over Eunice, this is true, but they had never competed over Mr. Mitchell’s affections.

The darker, wiser part of Edith, a part of her forged by her time spent in the cold, rotting darkness of Allerdale with nothing but the moans of the dead to keep her company at night, whispers the truth of Eunice’s perceived triumph to Edith, and it is too awful, too painful to think on, but at times she does so anyway-

Eunice’s lover is warm and real and alive and Edith’s is dead and cold and buried on a whole other continent.

The thought is a knife twisting in the fragile tissue of her broken heart, and Edith blinks back tears.

Spine straight, chin up, eyes forward.

Always forward.

 

vii

 

_July, 1902_

 

Working on the book had been a means of therapy. The methodical nature of editing had been a distraction, but the book had also allowed Edith to spill some of her feelings out into words in a way that, while cathartic, had also seemed less personal, less painful, because in the book, they were merely happening to a character. She could pretend that she had never felt the icy cold tendrils of fear, the rushing vividness of pure adrenaline, the near-invincible joy and the crushing grief that came of love, when they were happening to her heroine instead of her.

_E. Sharpe._

She chooses the pen-name partly because it is ambiguous in gender without being a lie, and partly because Edith cannot help but cherish carrying the last name Sharpe. It is one of the few things that she has left of Thomas. Her fingers brush gently over her rounded abdomen, over the child she is eagerly anticipating, the only other thing she has left of Thomas. 

But also, Edith simply  _likes_ the way that Sharpe sounds- cold and dangerous and masculine, just like Thomas, that infuriatingly contradictory man.

When Alan sees the pen-name that she has chosen, she sees the grief in his eyes for all but a moment. Then he smiles at her politely and excuses himself. He does not cease in his friendliness, for they are far too close for that, but his proposals of marriage come to an end, and Edith is relieved, if regretful that she has hurt him.

She titles her book _Crimson Peak_ and begins the publishing process.

 

viii

 

_August 11, 1902_

 

When Edith’s waters break and soak her pretty sky blue skirts, her panic informs her that she is perhaps not as prepared as she had thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Let me know what you thought guys! And uh... maybe in your reviews you could remind of a couple things about the movie?
> 
> A.) What were the names of Thomas' wives? I remember Enola and I think there was a Margaret, but I'm shaky on the third.
> 
> B.) Thomas had previously tried to collect revenue in London, Milan and where else?
> 
> C.) Was it ever actually stated whether Thomas and Lucille's child was a boy or a girl?
> 
> Thanks so much you guys!

**Author's Note:**

> Thoughts? Too short? (I kinda really like the length though...)
> 
> Other thoughts?


End file.
